Five Nights at Freddy's (video game)

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(Cue Evil Laugh)

Five Nights at Freddy's is a horror game with a simple premise on paper: you are Mike Schmidt, the newly employed watchman over at Freddy Fazbear's Pizza, and are tasked with surveying the restaurant after hours via security camera to make sure no harm whatsoever falls upon the animatronic characters who perform for the visiting children during the day. Sounds easy, right?

Well, your employers didn't quite tell you that the animatronics need to roam around at night to prevent their servos from locking up. Understandable, right?

Well, you also weren't told that the animatronics have screwy A.I. that causes them to think that any humans spotted after hours are bare endoskeletons, and will react by following restaurant protocol by getting you in costume. And by "getting you in costume", I mean shoving you into an empty Freddy Fazbear costume that is filled to the brim with sharp metal components, wires and crossbeams that will basically act as an iron maiden. Well, that's no big deal, right? After all, the only two doors that can lead to your office are easily shut with a press of a button.

...It looks like you've been kept in the dark about a lot of things, huh? Your doors are connected to a small power source that uses up energy every time you shut your doors. This same power source also taps into the hallway lights and camera feed, and if you use up all of your power, well, you're kind of screwed. The restaurant's owners are cheapskates who refuse to put in tons of money for a reliable power source, which means that if you use up your power, you're basically a sitting duck waiting in the darkness for the titular Freddy Fazbear to kill you. Oh Crap.

As you can likely tell by now, Five Nights at Freddy's is no mere horror game, it's also a resource management-based strategy game. If you wish to survive the night, you need to make sure that 1: no animatronics get into your office and murder you, and 2: you conserve power as best as you can from 12:00 a.m. to 6:00 a.m. Each animatronic (Chica, Bonnie, Foxy and the titular Freddy Fazbear himself) has their own pattern of movements and triggers, which is important for you to observe so you can make sure that you don't end up with an animatronic screaming in your face. While the game seems like it gets its horror factor from jump scares, the true scariness comes from how frantic and paranoid you get trying to keep tabs on all the animatronics and managing your power, if anything the inevitable jump scare can almost be considered a relief.

The game can be purchased on Steam, Google Play and Desura for PC users, as well as the iTunes App Store for mobile devices.

It is, without a doubt, the most popular and highest-selling Indy game franchise of all time. Since the game was an unexpected smash hit, five sequels were made, in relatively quick succession, as well as a spin-off FNaF World. An Augmented Reality version of Five Nights at Freddy's called Five Nights at Freddy's AR: Special Deliverywas released in November 2019, followed by a Survival Horror addition called Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach in December 2021.

Tropes used in Five Nights at Freddy's (video game) include:

• Adult Fear:
  • While children absolutely love the animatronic band, adults are unnerved by them, and for good reason. At least five children were murdered in the pizzeria years ago and were stuffed inside of the animatronics. The animatronics still smell awful and are said to leak blood and mucus to this day.
  • In fact, let's look at the fact that a monstrous excuse of a human being was able to dress up as one of the characters that children loved, and lured five of them away from their parents and murdered them in cold blood. Just about any parent in their right mind would be horrified that this could happen to their own child one day.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: According to Phone Guy, this is the reason why the animatronics brutally murder anyone they see after dark, they think that they're stumbling upon a naked endoskeleton and are simply putting it back in its costume. However, the animatronics act in ways that can't be chalked up to rogue A.I. such as Chica leering evilly into the cameras or Foxy rushing straight at your position if you don't look at Pirate's Cove enough. There's something very wrong at Freddy Fazbear's Pizza, and as the newspaper clippings detailing the murders from the past tell you, it's very likely that it's haunted by the vengeful spirits of children murdered on restaurant grounds.
• Alone with the Psycho: There's absolutely no friendly presence aside from the phone messages left behind by a former employee that play at the beginning of each night: it's just you and four bloodthirsty killer animatronics and a pants-shittingly terrifying hallucination of a ghostly Freddy costume.
• And I Must Scream: It's heavily implied that the robots are possessed by the spirits of dead children who were murdered in the restaurant by a madman in a costume, and have no way to move on to the afterlife while they are forever trapped within the animatronic bodies of the characters they loved so much.
• Antagonist Title
• Apocalyptic Log: Well, kind of. You're not in a doomsday scenario or anything, but you do receive messages each night from a former employee who informs you about the behavior of the animatronics and how you can deal with them until Night 4, where he gets cornered and slaughtered by pretty much every animatronic working together.
• Arc Words: IT'S ME, a phrase you will be seeing a lot of during hallucinations later on in the game.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: The reasons why you're fired at the end of Night 7 are as follows: tampering with the animatronics, general unprofessionalism and odor.
• Artificial Stupidity: The animatronics don't suffer from this as they're quite adept at slipping into the office whenever you're distracted, but at the end of the day, they will always enter from a certain door: Bonnie and Foxy through the left, Chica and Freddy from the right. If you close one door, it will be impossible for two to get in, though one of the other two remaining will kill you from the other end.
• Bait and Switch: All promotional materials for the game made it seem like you'd only have to be dealing with three animatronics: Bonnie, Chica and Freddy. Come Night 2, however, you start having to babysit Foxy, an unexpected fourth animatronic who will attack if you don't look at Pirate's Cove enough. And as a truly nasty surprise, he's able to show up on Night 1 in case if you thought you could cheese it by simply never checking your monitor because unlike Bonnie and Chica who only attack once you look at and lower the monitor, Foxy will attack no matter what.
• Bear Hug: This is Freddy's jumpscare whenever the power's out.
• Bears are Bad News: Indeed. Especially if those bears happen to be golden.
• Beary Cute: Despite invoking the Uncanny Valley, Freddy has an oddly cute charm that endears him to in-universe children and fans alike. A lot of his incarnations in future games would further embody this trope in different ways.
• Behind the Black: If you aren't careful, lowering your tablet will reveal Bonnie, Chica or Freddy waiting to scream in your face. Somehow, you weren't able to see them get in despite the fact that realistically, there's no way you'd miss a hulking, heavy animatronic stepping into your office.
• Big Bad: Freddy Fazbear himself is this, of course. He does nothing for the first couple of nights and isn't all that active on Night 3, but from Night 4 onwards, Freddy cuts the shit and gets serious, and proves to be THE hardest animatronic to deal with. And should the power go out, he's always the one who will confront you, leering at you from the darkness while his damnable music box plays before swooping in for the kill.
• Bigger Bad: As mentioned in several newspapers that replace the Rules For Safety sign at random intervals explain, there was a homicidal madman who put on a spare costume and lured five children into a back room where he slaughtered them. Given that those dead children are haunting the animatronics that are trying to kill you, this makes this unknown killer (later revealed to be a man named William Afton) directly responsible for this game's entire setup.
  • And the sequel revealed through a series of weird cutscenes that the Prize Corner Puppet was around in this game the entire time despite never being seen. Given the nature of those cutscenes, the Puppet seems directly responsible for Freddy's behavior in some manner, making him this.
• Black Comedy: Let's face it: as terrifying as your fate at the hands of the animatronics should you screw up is, it's pretty amusing to hear Phone Guy discuss it cheerfully and nonchalantly in that charming Midwestern accent of his.
• Black Eyes of Evil: If Freddy attacks you when the lights are on, his eyes appear to be pitch black. This is also how they look anytime he leers into a camera while moving around the Pizzeria.
  • Ditto for Bonnie, who not only gets a pants-shittingly terrifying screen where he's staring directly into the storage room's camera, but there's also a rare screen that shows up whenever you die where he is sporting these before they light up at the center...
  • Golden Freddy sports these by default, fitting for his hallucinatory status.
• Black Speech: During Night 5, you get another phone call despite the fact that Phone Guy was clearly murdered in the last message. Cue unintelligible terrifying demon noises coming out of your phone. While it seems indecipherable at first, the message is actually a heavily distorted passage from Autobiography of a Yogi that talks about how metal has a life force of its own.
• Bloodless Carnage: While the ultimate fate that befalls you should you get attacked by an animatronic should be incredibly bloody and gory, there's no blood in sight on the game over screen, and the only gore is your eyeballs and teeth having cleanly popped out of the costume you were stuffed into.
• Brain Food: Back some time in 1987, an animatronic chomped down on someone's skull and tore out their frontal lobe. This incident was dubbed The Bite of '87.
• Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick:
  • The job description for the pizzeria seems pretty innocuous, as it mentions your work hours (12:00 AM to 6:00 AM) and your job description (protect the equipment and animatronics)... but then, there's the warning stating "Not responsible for injury/dismemberment".
  • The rules listed in the East Hall seem relatively normal enough (minus maybe the "Don't poop on floor" rule), but the very last one reads, "Leave before dark."
• Brutal Bonus Level: Whenever you beat all five nights, you get a sixth one added that has the difficulty ramped up considerably. Should you wish, you can make Night 7 even more brutal by setting the A.I. of the animatronics at the most difficult settings.
• Camera Screw: Sometimes when you look at the cameras, the words IT'S ME will flash on screen, as well as various other hallucinations like Bonnie's eyeless face.
• Catch Phrase: "Hello, hello!". Courtesy of Phone Guy.
• Controllable Helplessness:
  • The entire game revolves around this as its main gameplay mechanic. You're stuck in your tiny little office unable to leave or move around (not counting you turning your head from right to left) and with no way to fight back against the animatronics should they approach you. Sure, you can shut the door on them... but ultimately, it feels less like you properly fighting them and more like you delaying an inevitable jumpscare.
  • If you don't shoo away Bonnie or Chica and leave the door they're hanging around open for too long, they'll disable the door and light buttons. At this point, you may as well cover your ears and shut your eyes because a jumpscare is inevitable: you can look at your tablet and put it down to have Bonnie or Chica scream in your face, do nothing and allow Foxy to charge in from the left door, or instead have Freddy creep in and pounce from the right.
  • Should you run out of power, EVERYTHING stops working and leaves you in a darkened office. Freddy will then show up and play his music box tune before rushing in and killing you. If you play dead and don't move, you could theoretically make it to 6:00 a.m. depending on how far you were into the night as Freddy will take longer to kill you. If you move though, the music will stop sooner and he'll attack you that much quicker.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: The person in charge of the pizzeria can be interpreted as this: despite the fact that children were murdered on restaurant grounds, someone was chomped on by one of the animatronics, and night guards are regularly slaughtered by the killbots, they've partaken in numerous cover-ups and have done all they can to get people on their side so the restaurant can stay open.
• Cosmetic Award: Should you beat Night 5, Night 6 and Night 7 at its highest difficulty setting, you'll get one star on the main menu for each night beaten. Originally, there were only stars for Nights 5 and 6, but the third was added after someone successfully cleared Night 7 with all animatronics set on the highest difficulty level, a feat that the creator Scott Cawthon thought was impossible.
• Cower Power: Whenever the power goes out, and it's a bit later than 5 a.m., you should do as Phone Guy suggested and play dead by not moving at all when Freddy shows up. Doing so will cause him to play his music box longer and thus may get you to wait out the clock.
• Crapsack World: Let's face it: once you've learned about the pizzeria's dark past and realize that it's still open despite that, you really wonder if there's any justice in this world. Thankfully, the restaurant has fallen on hard times and closes after Night 7... but then someone opened up a horror park based off of this place in the third game, making the company shutting down mean nothing in the long run.
• Creator Cameo: Phone Guy's voice is provided by none other than the game's creator himself: Scott Cawthon.
• Creepy Shadowed Undereyes: Thanks to how the animatronics are designed (their eyes are attached to their endoskeletons which can be seen through eyeholes in the costumes), they appear to have these.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: The result of getting caught by any of the animatronics is you getting stuffed in a Freddy Fazbear costume with all the sharp metallic bits inside, a gory, slow, agonizing death that takes you out iron maiden style. Unfortunately, Phone Guy met this fate as your Night 4 message indicates.
• Cutting the Knot: Foxy doesn't bother with slowly moseying across the pizzeria. If he leaves Pirate's Cove, he books it straight for your office.
• Dangerous Workplace: Given that your workplace is home to four killer animatronics who will grant you an agonizing death via lethal Freddy costume, it's safe to say that calling Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria a dangerous workplace is the understatement of the century.
• Darkness Equals Death: You better hope to god that you're getting close to 6 a.m. if you squander all of your power. If not, then you're completely and utterly screwed.
• Daylight Horror: The Bite of '87 was this, seeing as how it happened during broad daylight and as the second game confirms, during a child's birthday party.
• Death Glare: Pretty much every animatronic sports one of these at one point or another, but one moment that will really stick out in your mind is a rare screen where all three of the main animatronics are on the show stage, glaring malevolently at you with their teeth bared.
• The Dev Team Thinks of Everything: There was a rumor going around for a while that if you set the animatronic AIs to 1-9-8-7, you'd get access to a secret ending. In order to quell any rumors, Scott later programmed in a Golden Freddy jumpscare to scare off anyone trying to get the non-existent secret ending}}.
• Difficulty Spike: There are two of these that happen to coincide with the introduction of the other two animatronics who aren't active on night 1: Foxy and Freddy. On Night 2, you now have to check Pirate's Cove at regular intervals because Foxy will rush your way if you don't while on Night 4, Freddy becomes active and is much harder to keep tabs on than the other animatronics.
• Digital Piracy Is Evil: If you decide to pirate a copy of the game, it will be fully playable... but the caveat is that closing the game will cause a jumpscare.
• Dramatic Disappearing Display: While it's obvious that shit is about to hit the fan if your power shuts off, your power and usage HUDs as well as your clock and day number disappearing ought to drive it home.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Complete Night 7, and you'll probably never be happier about being fired.
• Easy Level Trick: The first couple of nights can be cheesed simply by closing your left door and keeping it shut while doing nothing for the rest of the night. Foxy won't be able to get in as he only comes in from the left, same with Bonnie. While Chica can still get in, she won't attack you unless if you pull up the camera and put it back down. Once Freddy becomes active though, this trick will become useless.
• Eldritch Abomination: The pizzeria houses one in the form of Golden Freddy, a spectral animatronic whose very presence causes you to hallucinate wildly before crashing your game.
• Eldritch Location: The pizzeria itself seems normal at first, albeit filled with killer animatronics. As the nights progress, however, you start getting more and more terrifying hallucinations, and those combined with the horrifying Night 5 phone call and the mere presence of Golden Freddy ought to clue you in that something is very, very wrong with this establishment.
• Everything Trying to Kill You: Indeed. And it's not just the animatronics, one of the posters can randomly turn into a Golden Freddy poster. Just looking at it will summon Golden Freddy into your office, who will cause you to hallucinate wildly die in seconds unless if you look at the cameras right away.
• Evil Duo: From the start of the game, Bonnie and Chica will be gunning for you every night (except for Night 7 if you put their A.I. on 0). They both act in the same way: they lurk outside of your office and if left there too long, they'll disable your lights and door and jumpscare you the next time you look at your monitor.
• Evil Laugh: The tell-tale sign that Freddy changed location, and if you hear a little girl's laugh, you better be ready to look right back at the camera because something got in your room when you weren't looking...
• Evil Sounds Deep: While Freddy has the same hellishly high-pitched scream as the other animatronics, his laughter as he crosses the Pizzeria is incredibly deep.
  • Meanwhile, Golden Freddy is the opposite: the laughter that plays when you summon him is high pitched, but his scream is so deep that it's a roar.
• Expy:
  • Freddy and friends are pretty much horrific analogues to the original Chuck E. Cheese characters before everything got revamped.
  • Meanwhile, Golden Freddy has been compared to both Winnie the Pooh and Slenderman. The Pooh Bear comparisons come from him being a yellow bear meant to entertain children, while the Slenderman comparisons come from how he causes hallucinations just from being looked at, and his face covers the screen should you die to him.
• Eyeless Face: Bonnie and Freddy can appear this way whenever they stare directly into the camera, and Bonnie has this effect going on in a rare, terrifying game over screen and hallucination. Golden Freddy however is truly eyeless... though he has tiny white pinpricks faintly glowing at the centers...
• Five-Bad Band: It's a bit of a stretch, but the animatronics do form one thanks to how their behavior works.
  • Big Bad/Evil Genius: Freddy Fazbear himself. He's the leader of the animatronic band and the deadliest of the bunch, displaying a knack for stealthy and sneaky behavior.
  • The Dragon: Bonnie. He's the most active of the animatronics and will likely get the lion's share of the pre-Night 3 jumpscares due to how persistent and aggressive he is.
  • The Brute: Foxy. Unlike the other animatronics who roam the restaurant before trying to sneak into the office, he forgoes any and all tricks and will just rush you down if you don't check up on him enough. Further driving this home is the fact that even if you shut the door on him, he'll bang on the door in order to drain you of your precious power.
  • The Dark Chick: Chica. She's the only female animatronic, as well as the one who's least likely to kill you since she likes to goof off in the kitchen. When she does show up at your office, she is a bit harder to shoo away than Bonnie, though.
  • Bigger Bad: Golden Freddy, along with the Puppet from the sequel. Given that the cutscene sequences in the sequel show both of them doing... something to the animatronics, it's not exactly a stretch of the imagination. Further supporting this is the Puppet doing something to connect the souls of the murdered children to the animatronics.
• Four Is Death: There are a total of four not counting Golden Freddy animatronics gunning for you. Coincidentally, Phone Guy's death message plays on the fourth night, which also happens to be when Freddy really gets serious.
• The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: Golden Freddy doesn't stuff you in a suit to kill you. Oh no, he crashes the goddamn game.
• Game Breaking Bug: An intentional one is Golden Freddy crashing the game for his jumpscare. It's programmed so that the game over screen doesn't show on purpose, mainly to drive home how creepy and otherworldly he is.
• Genre Savvy: Night 7 is also the game's custom night, which allows you to set the difficulty of the animatronic's A.I. If you wish, you can simply set their difficulty to the lowest level in order to make the night laughably easy.
• Giggling Villain: Anytime Freddy moves around, his movement will be accompanied by an unsettling low-pitched laugh. In reality, this is actually a little girls' giggle slowed to demonic levels and plays unaltered whenever you look at Golden Freddy's poster.
• Guide Dang It: Everything about Golden Freddy is this. The way you summon him can be done purely by accident many times before you realize that it's done when you observe a poster that can randomly change to show him. As for countering his attack, it turns out that you have to simply pull the camera back up right when you look at him, and he'll vanish.
• Hallucinations: Mike occasionally gets these. They're either a close up of Freddy, an eyeless Bonnie head, or the words "IT'S ME."
• Harder Than Hard: If you wish to do so, on the custom night, you can set all four animatronic's A.I. up to 20, the highest difficulty level. This mode (dubbed 4/20 mode by the fanbase) is ludicrously difficult, if not flat out near impossible thanks to the fact that with all the micro-managing and countering of the animatronics (especially Freddy and Foxy) that you have to do, the RNG can and will fuck you over at any point in the challenge. In fact, Scott Cawthon himself thought that it was impossible to beat before it was proven that you can do it... it's just probably going to be the hardest thing that you will ever do.
• Haunted Technology: It was hinted that the animatronics were haunted in this game, and later games would flat-out confirm it.
• Hell Is That Noise:
  • The infamous screeching sound the animatronics make when they manage to get into the office.
  • Also the tune that Freddy plays if you run out of power before the clock strikes 6.
• Hold the Line: You don't fight back against the animatronics, the game's mechanics are oriented in a way that you basically have to hold them off for six (In-game) hours straight.
• Homicide Machines: If you get caught by any of these lovely fellows, you're gonna have a bad time.
• Hope Spot: If you're at 5:00 a.m. and your power runs out, the waiting period before Freddy finishes his song and attacks turns into one of the tensest, scariest hope spots there is. Especially if his song already finished, and the room goes completely black, as you still have a tiny chance of the clock rolling to 6 AM and saving you from Freddy's wrath.
• I Know You're Watching Me: Whenever you're scanning the cameras for any signs of the animatronics, more often then not, you'll find them glaring menacingly at the camera, they know full and well that you're watching them.
• Infant Immortality: Averted with a vengeance as far as the background story is concerned, as five children were murdered on restaurant grounds by a psycho in a mascot outfit.
• Infinite Supplies: Ha ha ha... NO. You have a very limited amount of power that will slowly trickle downward as time goes by, and will go faster if you check the cameras, turn on the hallway lights, or shut the doors. If the power goes out, then that's it. You're doomed, unless if you can wait out the clock at the tail-end of your shift.
• Instant Win Condition: It doesn't matter what's going on when it happens: you can have Bonnie and Chica groaning creepily while waiting for you to lower your security tablet, Foxy barreling down the hallway like a rocket, or be stuck with absolutely no power while Freddy stands menacingly in the doorway, if the clock reaches 6 AM, then the animatronics will go back to their designated areas and leave you alone while you live to fight another day.
• Interface Screw:
  • Bonnie and Chica can mess with the cameras if you stare at them for too long, and will tamper with the doors and lights if you let them stand outside of your office for too long as well.
  • As the game goes on, the security guard will begin to hallucinate scary images, and looking at Golden Freddy will cause tons of these to pop up before he kills you.
• Jump Scare: The animatronics kill you by breaking the silence with a blood-curdling scream, and are either waiting for you to put down your monitor or come charging into your room unexpectedly.
• Level Editor: Night 7 is this to a point: you set up the difficulty of the animatronics instead of creating your own pizzeria layout.
• Lights Off, Somebody Dies: If your power runs out, your life will be snuffed out along with the light unless if you're close to the end of your shift.
• Magnum Opus: This game is considered to be Scott Cawthon's. His previous games weren't as well received and sold poorly, but this game was an enormous success with tons of sales, great reviews and a humongous fanbase that came right out of nowhere.
• More Teeth Than the Osmond Family: Each animatronic is packing two sets of teeth: a set on their costumes and a set on their endoskeletons. It's the most noticeable with Chica.
• Nested Mouths: As mentioned above, the animatronics have this going on for them.
• Never Found the Body: The company can claim that this happened to you: if you're murdered by the animatronics, you get labeled as a missing person... after the company has removed any traces of your existence such as blood and body parts. By doing this, they escape legal responsibility for their employee's deaths so the show can go on.
  • However, this appears to be legitimate in the case of the children who were murdered at the restaurant years back. Their bodies may be rotting inside of the animatronics, but no one as of this day truly knows where they could be.
• Nightmare Face: Every animatronic sports this to some extent, but Bonnie takes this to a whole new level. He has both a rare camera screen and a hallucination where he appears to be eyeless, his maw ominously hanging open, and the latter even appears as a rare game over screen. Freddy also sports several of these on-camera whenever he moves around, the worst being when he's right near your office and will enter and will kill you in a split-second.
• The Nineties: The game seems to take place during this time period, given that the paycheck you get (a measly $4.00 an hour) puts you squarely in the year 1993.
• Nintendo Hard: This game is actually quite challenging as well as scary: your power runs out constantly, and will drain faster anytime you take an action. The animatronics can run in and surprise you at any second, and the difficulty skyrockets once Freddy joins in on the fun.
• Non-Indicative Name: The game's name doesn't really make it sound like you're going to do night watch at a terrifying Chuck E. Cheese analogue.
• Nonstandard Game Over:
  • Freddy is the only animatronic who gets two death screens: the first is his standard scream-in-your-face attack that Bonnie and Chica have if he catches you normally, but he also gets one where he comes to bear hug you out of the darkness if the power runs out.
  • Should you die at the hands of Golden Freddy, you get treated by tons of hallucinations, Golden Freddy roaring in your face, and the game crashing.
  • Noodle Incident: The Bite of '87 is never elaborated on in this game, or any subsequent games.
• Nothing Is Scarier:
  • The fact that you'll be sitting in dead silence while the animatronics take their time moseying around the pizzeria for long periods of time makes for one hell of a spooky atmosphere.
  • This also goes for the kitchen: it's the only room without a video feed, so whatever goes on in there is left purely to your imagination while you listen to either Freddy's theme playing, or Chica eating... god knows what.
  • In this game, one of the things that made Golden Freddy so scary was that there was almost no information about him whatsoever. He is an empty costume who teleports into your office if you look at a certain poster... and that's it. The second game shed a bit more light on his purpose and appearance, but we still don't have all the answers regarding him.
  • If your power runs out, Freddy will play his song before making the office pitch-black and completely silent. At this point, you either can make it to 6 AM, or wait for Freddy to attack after a painfully long wait.
• Obvious Rule Patch: If you thought you'd be smart and never bring up your security tablet since Bonnie and Chica only attack when you raise it, Foxy will rush in and kill you anyway (even on Night 1!) and thus serves as a way to keep you looking at the camera. Freddy is more or less the same: like Foxy, he can kill you regardless if your tablet is up or not.
• Offscreen Teleportation: This seems to be how the animatronics work, since they only move when you're not looking at them on the cameras. Foxy is the exception, as you can clearly see him running down the hallway when he's ready to kill you.
• Oh Crap: Phone Guy has one when Freddy and Chica get into his office during his Night 4 recording. And the player will certainly feel this at some point, especially if you spot Foxy running towards your station.
• Orcus on His Throne: For the first couple of nights, Freddy sits around on the Show Stage and does nothing. Whenever he becomes active though...
• Playing Possum: This is a method suggested by Phone Guy in case if an animatronic does get into your office. This method was believed to be a viable strategy to stall out Freddy after a power outage, but proper analysis of the game's code revealed that the speed at which he attacks is truly random.
• Public Domain Soundtrack: The music box tune Freddy plays whenever he's about to kill you or when he's in the kitchen is a rendition of Georges Bizet's Les Toreadors.
• Punch Clock Hero: It's very likely that Mike is taking this very dangerous job because he desperately needs the pitiful paycheck it has to offer at the week's end.
• Random Event:
  • There are multiple events that can happen completely at random, one being that the "Out of order!" sign at Pirate's Cove can turn into a sign reading "IT'S ME".
  • Another one would be a rare game over screen that shows Bonnie sporting the mother of all Nightmare Faces, with pitch black eyes that slowly light up from the centers before you are taken to the main menu.
  • One of the posters can be changed into one of several crying figures, while another can turn into Freddy ripping off his own head, and the "Rules for Safety" poster can turn into one of four newspapers detailing the restaurant's dark past.
  • Then... there's Golden Freddy's method of appearing: he only shows up if you happen to glance at a poster that randomly changes to feature his face on it.
• Reality Ensues: It's relieving to know that thanks to the various horrible incidents that happened in the company's past along with the terrifying and unpredictable behavior of the animatronics, the restaurant is due to shut down for good thanks to the company running bankrupt.
• Resources Management Gameplay: The game revolves around conserving your power carefully. Fail to due so, and you'll end up with a dark room and a face full of Freddy.
• Retcon: The series' entire lore is built around this. This game states clearly that the animatronics would kill people only due to a malfunction that makes them mistake humans for naked endoskeletons without costumes on, the people's deaths coming from being forcibly stuffed inside a spring suit Freddy Fazbear costume by the animatronic who caught them. The background lore presented for the game suggests that it's the ghosts of four children who got murdered at the diner that are making the animatronics move around every night and causing them to malfunction, and that their killer wore the Golden Freddy suit when he lured them to their deaths. All subsequent games, however, expand the backstory so much that most of these details are no longer guaranteed to be true.
• Retirony: Phone Guy tells you in his first message that he's due to leave his job at the end of the week. Unfortunately, he dies very close to his last day on the job.
• The Reveal: In the restaurant's past, five children were spirited away by a lunatic in a mascot outfit who proceeded to brutally murder them and very likely stashed their corpses in the animatronics given that they started to ooze blood and mucus, as well as smell like rotting corpses. Thanks to this incident as well as the Bite of '87, the restaurant has fallen on hard times and thus shall close at the year's end.
• Scare Chord: Should you turn on the hallway lights and Bonnie or Chica are right outside waiting for you, one of these will play.
• Schmuck Bait: A common rumor back when the game was new said that if you entered the animatronic's A.I. as 1-9-8-7 on the custom night screen, you would get a secret ending. If you do that, Golden Freddy's jumpscare plays, game crashing and all. That ought to teach you not to believe everything you read on the internet!
• Second Law, My Ass: According to Phone Guy, the animatronics get around this by assuming that you're an endoskeleton out of costume. It turns out though that this may be complete and utter bullshit.
• Sir Not-Appearing-In-This-Trailer: Foxy never makes an appearance in the trailer, seeing as he was meant to be a surprise character when the game first came out.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: When the power runs out, and Freddy shows up to kill you, he'll play a rather delightful music box rendition of Les Toreadors before doing so.
• Spiritual Successor: While you're not able to trap the animatronics, this game is very reminiscent to games such as Night Trap and its ilk.
• Story Breadcrumbs: Should you want to learn about the game's backstory, you'll have to resort to reading newspapers that randomly appear to replace the Rules for Safety poster.
• Suck E. Cheese's: Freddy Fazbear's Pizza itself is this.
• Super-Persistent Predator: All the animatronics qualify to some extent, but Bonnie certainly counts as he is the most active and aggressive animatronic. He'll often end up outside of your office and may just give you the most jumpscares before Freddy comes to play. Humorously enough though, he seems to give up quickly after you slam the door in his face.
• Toilet Humor: One of the rules listed in the East Hall is "Don't poop on floor."
• Westminster Chimes: Used to signal that you have successfully made it to 6 AM.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: It may be hard to sympathize with them since they spend every night trying to gruesomely kill you, but the plight of the animatronics is horrifying. They're possessed by the vengeful spirits of murdered children that are trying to get revenge on the man that murdered them, and will tear through as many night guards as they can to find him so they can move on to the afterlife.
• You Are Already Dead:
  • If you try to turn on the lights or close one of the doors on one side of the office, but the buttons are jammed, that means either Bonnie or Chica have made it into the office, and they will Jump Scare you the very next time you put your camera down.
  • If you don't shut the left door quickly enough, Foxy sprinting down the halls if you either don't check Pirate Cove enough times or check it too many times can count.